As a self-described "visual anthropologist", Brouws recognizes that photographs exist within a socio-economic, political, or historical context. Every landscape can be read as a "field of information" revealing evidence of the external forces that have shaped them. From his Franchised Landscapes series, Brouws references and complements the photography of the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. In addition to studying the newly constructed suburban world, as those artists so eloquently did, Brouws explores terrain vague inner city areas and considers how racial segregation, white flight, disinvestment, corporate takeovers, outsourcing, and other factors have reciprocally shaped urban, suburban and even highway spaces. As he clearly demonstrates, The New West has become a "non-place" landscape comprised of big box stores and fast food chains with their glowing, corporate logos mounted atop skyscraper-high poles.
The poet Gary Snyder referred to these signs as "...skinny wildweed flowers sticking up...in the asphalt riparian zone." Brouws creates single images and diptychs, as well as typologies such as his Signs Without Signification-portraits of light-box signs from once thriving, but now abandoned businesses that reveal Capitalism's cyclical nature and it tendencies toward "creative destruction." (from Artweek LA website)
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